[russb]

"The pieces are fabricated and joined with the aft pressure bulkhead at Boeing’s North Charleston, S.C. plant and then delivered for final assembly to the company’s nearby final assembly building or flown to Everett, Wash."

Not the first time quality control has been an issue at the N.C. plant.

From a New York Times article back in 2019: "Ever since, Qatar has bought only Dreamliners built in Everett." [0]

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/business/boeing-dreamline...

[aaronbrethorst]

Totally unsurprising that SC is having quality issues.

"We have a manager that will physically watch us while we're working on the jet and watch us as we go to the bathroom," he says. "I'm a 40-year-old military veteran and I have a 20-something-year-old manager asking me why I use time to use the bathroom."

https://psmag.com/economics/a-tale-of-two-boeing-factories

[esaym]

Sounds sucky to always be watched but, as someone that actually worked in an aircraft repair facility, we'd show up for work at 6am, then a 5 minute "break" at 8am and 10am followed by a 30 minute unpaid lunch from 12-12:30. Then another 5 minute break at 2:30pm followed by work ending at 4:30pm. And that was the schedule for Monday-Thursday followed by 8 hour days on Friday and Saturday. It got old quick and I left that field and went back to school lol.

But the point is, anytime you provide 4 "breaks" a day for bathroom time, you'll get some managers staring at you for breaking the pattern. And don't forget that most tasks in aircraft assembly require 2 people. If you're installing fasteners, you've got to normally have someone on the other side of the assembly to either buck the rivet or put a nut on a bolt. So one person running for the toilet causes work to stop for others.

[txru]

That's just why workers' unions are useful though. Workers need breaks, especially more experienced (older) workers, managers don't want to provide those breaks. The union can work with the workers to determine how many breaks they need, and have the negotiating ability to back up workers whose breaks are being violated like above.

[Alupis]

> That's just why workers' unions are useful though. Workers need breaks, especially more experienced (older) workers, managers don't want to provide those breaks.

The post you're responding to just stated they had 4 breaks a day. I doubt Boeing isn't providing breaks either, since that would be illegal.

It's entirely possible to have a non-union shop and still have highly skilled and fairly compensated employees.

There are always going to be some employees that abuse things - people taking bathroom breaks every hour, 10 minutes at a time, etc. Those are the ones that get let go, when you're not a Union Shop. Unfortunately, for all the good Unions do, they also tend to protect exactly these sorts of employees, making it difficult or impossible to trim poorly performing employees.

[txru]

4 breaks a day isn't either enough or too much in general-- it's very job and industry dependent.

Refusing to provide breaks is illegal, true, but it's trivially easy to legally force employees to take many fewer than they're entitled. Amazon employees in FCs don't piss in bottles because they're very into logistic efficiency of picking...

True, there will always be entities that abuse understandings, employer and employee. The thing is, corporations are superentities with monopsonic power. Employees are units, discouraged from communicating, with limited time in a day to make complaints or study potential improvements to working condition (or law, for that matter).

Unions are a method for setting up a superentity that has the bargaining, informational, and legal power to have a more equal footing with the corporate superentity.

Particularly when Unions have substantial ownership of the company, they have no specific wish to lose dues-paying members or make the company fail.

[Alupis]

> or make the company fail

Hostess famously failed due to the Bakers Union stalling wage talks, even though the Teamsters (representing the other portion of the employees) agreed. Now... nobody works for Hostess and everyone lost their jobs.

Not all Unions actually align their goals with what's best for the employees. Sometimes, it's all about collecting union dues...

[CraigJPerry]

>> It's entirely possible to have a non-union shop and still have highly skilled and fairly compensated employees

It’s really hard to do though due to the wrong incentives being in place. You’d need something like worker co-op’s to get the incentives aligned reliably in all cases, such that you don’t need unions.

[Alupis]

Not really. Plenty of businesses don't have unioned employees, and get along just fine. I'd wager there's more non-union employers than union employers in this country.

Unfortunately, unioned jobs where it's known to be difficult or impossible to fire poor performing employees, seems to attract exactly that type of employee, in my experience.

[mjevans]

Such precise schedule keeping is a job for robots. Either factor in time for squishy bio-bot maintenance or switch to machines.

[samatman]

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Taylorism substantially predates robotics, and the low-hanging fruit for robot assembly in factories is good and plucked.

[throwaway_pdp09]

I'm no manager but I'd guess some of the most basic rules of management will say "don't do this". Yet some managers do it, like they can't see the damage it's doing to trust and morale, and that it will simply not (unless under special circumstances) bring any higher quality or other value. Yet still it happens. It's so strange.

[HumblyTossed]

Insecurity. "I'm the manager, therefore you WILL do as I say!". These people can boss people around, but they don't know how to manage.

[toomuchtodo]

Good management can’t be taught, it can only be learned through experience. Hence why MBAs used to require work experience or the concept of non commissioned officers in the military. You must experience the suck to learn how not to suck.

With that said, you have to still make an effort to filter out people with no empathy or low emotional IQ from management roles. Having authority over another human being is serious business.

[wnevets]

>With that said, you have to still make an effort to filter out people with no empathy or low emotional IQ from management roles. Having authority over another human being is serious business.

yeah but their resume, they went to "insert super important college here"!

[ashtonkem]

Micromanaging people is a lot of work, and it prevents both the IC and the manager from doing important tasks. Micromanagement either comes from managers not trusting their reports (this can have several causes), or from the manager feeling insecure and finding ways to project control or power over their charges.

[thehappypm]

The exact opposite of good leadership, that is, leading through influence.

[omginternets]

Or perhaps (also) toxic pressure from above?

[throwaway_pdp09]

IME a good manager is an umbrella against the shit raining down from higher. I suppose they're not good so... yep. They folded.

[arethuza]

"There are three kinds of managers: the shit umbrella, the shit funnel and the shit fan."

[ashtonkem]

It’s also extremely rare to find an organization with middle managers that don’t reflect the culture of the organization as a whole. If the middle management is toxic and/or incompetent, it’s a good bet that all layers of management are similar.

[PedroBatista]

Most of these "managers" are just farmhands like the workers. They are there to be the point of contact with the rest of the cattle, do the dirty work of enforcing whatever they were told and to accomplish that they resort to what they "know", which is micro-managing and fear.

The less popular part of this whole thing is that the "quality" of the workers at this particular plant is less than "optimal" let's just leave it at that, and that issue is general knowledge since the beginning.

[numpad0]

Human education hasn't reached to the level that people understand pain and productivity has zero or negative correlations.

[vidanay]

I'd have to resist the urge to walk up to that manager and stare them in the eyes while peeing on their shoes.

[dang]

Please don't do this here.

[speedgoose]

You are very badass.

[piva00]

Interestingly I found out about Boeing's N.C. plant quality control issues from an Al-Jazeera report on the 787 [0] way back in 2014. The part about the plant has an interview with an employee recording other employees worried about safety, training and other issues. There is a Q&A with a Boeing VP that is interrupted by some PR/legal aide when questions about quality issues in Charleston start.

It's an ongoing issue for quite a long time...

[0] https://youtu.be/rvkEpstd9os?t=1434 (I've timestamped to the relevant part about the Charleston plant)

[PedroBatista]

It has been an issue since the very beginning. The play from Boeing was obviously to cut costs and since many states in the US have been plagued by the complete collapse of manufacturing jobs since at least the 70's they are willing to give Boeing tax cuts and incentives by the billions.

The only small problem is that they turned this plant into a sweatshop, not only the workers have no aviation culture but people in power seem to think they are bolting on just another Ford Pinto like the old days.

[ceejayoz]

> Managers were also urged to not hire unionized employees from the Boeing factory in Everett, where the Dreamliner is also made, according to two former employees.

> “They didn’t want us bringing union employees out to a nonunion area,” said David Kitson, a former quality manager, who oversaw a team responsible for ensuring that planes are safe to fly.

> “We struggled with that,” said Mr. Kitson, who retired in 2015. “There wasn’t the qualified labor pool locally.” Another former manager, Michael Storey, confirmed his account.

Oops.

[hinkley]

The entire 787 project plan smelled like union busting to me. I was very surprised they didn’t strike over it.

But the company also has regrets about how the project was run and vowed not to do that again. I doubt that applies to the [SC] part of the equation, though.

[ptmcc]

787 was an exercise in out of touch MBAs and execs trying to run an engineering and development program with all the worst business & management practices, and the results show.

Such a shame because the 777 program in the 90s was an excellent program to model the 787 after, but Boeing threw it all away to agitate the union, penny pinch everything, and outsource all that expertise to the lowest bidder.

Ultimately it ended up costing more to build a worse product with a long tail of severe post-launch quality and design issues.

[hinkley]

Airplane programs at Boeing are siloed. They build up a little company to run the program and then retire bits of it once production is looming. There's no guarantee that any sanity found on one program will translate to another. Or insanity.

This is why I said in another response that if Everett loses the 787 but gains 777 orders it may be bad news for the people on the 787 line but neutral news for the state. They could lay off 20,000 people, hire 12,000 of them back, and hire 8,000 new people or folks furloughed from some other program.

ETA:

> 787 was an exercise in out of touch MBAs and execs

I mentioned cynicism elsewhere. You may be right, but I always thought of it more as a Captain Ahab maneuver, where the unions are Moby Dick.

(As a child I did not know that the speech at the end of Wrath of Khan was from Moby Dick. That scene is much darker once you understand that a scholar has chosen these as his final words, knowing damned well how it ends. He will make the gesture anyway, even if the 'whale' survives.)

[xnyan]

*SC. “At least we’re not South Carolina”, the mantra of North Carolina

[hinkley]

People from Illinois pronounce it, ill eh NOY or ill uh NOY (even though proper french would be ill EE nwah) and get pissed when people from Wiscaaaahnseeehn pronounce it ILL uh noise. It is clear they are aware of this.

But people from Missouri (especially southern) may pronounce their state as misery. Having known someone who moved away from there, I'm assured this is perfectly accurate. Biases may have been involved, but 'state of misery' jokes basically write themselves.

[hinkley]

Apologies both to the fine people of North Carolina and the good people of Charleston. You do not all look the same and I did not mean to imply that Charleston has anything to do with North Carolina.

(I'm from the midwest, we take our cross-border rivalries far more seriously than should be legal, but nobody outside the midwest can tell you the difference between Iowa/Illinois/Indiana/Missouri and have no qualms about saying it to your face. The struggle is real)

[jkaptur]

I think it stands for "North Charleston" in this context.

[Pfhreak]

I was at Boeing when that plant opened up. I recall it specifically being talked about in hushed tones as a place where there would be no unions, and thus they could hire cheaper labor.

Don't get me wrong, the Everett plant certainly has had issues in the past (there are plenty of signs hanging up about Foreign Object Debris), but the company seems to have targeted cost cutting as priority one.

[akamia]

I was there at the same time and I remember the exact same thing. There was a lot of talk about this being used to offset some of the losses caused by any future union strikes and also as leverage when negotiating with the unions.

I also remember that there were consistent ongoing quality issues. Planes from SC would require significant rework when they arrived in Everett.

[virtue3]

It's almost like union employees under fair management do a better job or something /s

[nitrogen]

The auto industry seemed to provide a counterexample, or at least showed that the "management" part was the deciding factor.

If I were Boeing, I'd also be looking into the possibility of sabotage, but it's more likely cost cutting.

[djsumdog]

Yea I knew Peterbuilt an engineer who talked at how bad the work was at the Nashville/union plant. He watch people get fired for gross negligence, be hired back a month later. There are several fleets who would specifically order trucks from the other two non-union plants.

[x86_64Ubuntu]

A lot of your manufacturing is down south because of how hostile it is to unions down here. I know in SC, we have BMW, Volvo and I think Benz along with Boeing on the coast.

[omgwtfbyobbq]

I believe the federal circuit there has a much more limited interpretation of the ADA too, which can benefit employers in certain situations.

[pc86]

Companies wanting to operate in places without unions because the labor is cheaper isn't exactly the kind of thing that requires "hushed tones."

[Pfhreak]

It sure is if you are talking about workers rights to unionize, specifically, and how you plan to undercut the existing union.

[flowerlad]

And yet they are closing the Everett factory:

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/losing-787-would-be-ma...

[ceejayoz]

Yes, as part of a long-running union busting campaign.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/03/boeing-union...

> Boeing’s mere presence in South Carolina was already viewed as a union-busting move when the company first opened an aircraft production plant there in 2011 rather than Washington state, where Boeing had unionized operations. South Carolina has the lowest union membership rate in the United States at just 2.7% of workers. The National Labor Relations Board filed a federal complaint against Boeing for the move, accusing the company of violating federal labor law, before dropping it after the company came to an agreement with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM).

[hinkley]

That’s a speculative piece and the one it links to is as well.

The 787 was designed to not require as much infrastructure as the Everett plant has to offer. I’m out of the loop, but Wikipedia still lists most of the rest of their catalog as being produced in Everett, and the new 777 is coming online.

Sounds more like having to choose between 787 capacity and other production lines.

I’m not sure where they get losing the 787 meaning nothing to backfill it. For those specific employees, changing programs may be difficult and not all of them will be picked up, but for the region, I don’t see how this means 30k fewer jobs.

Also Everett does other things besides assembly. I think most of their IT and a few other programs are there.

[erentz]

And now Boeing is mulling closing 787 production in WA and moving it all to SC.

[PedroBatista]

The SC thing was to save on costs, now since this many years passed and no one got killed ( yet ), they are confident they can move it all there, where the sun is bright, the unions are pretty and the wages are low.